A Night in Havana (1988)

May 19, 1989

Review/Film;
Dizzy Plays A Gig in Havana

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: May 19, 1989

LEAD: ''A Night in Havana: Dizzy Gillespie in Cuba'' documents the great jazz trumpeter's triumphal visit to Cuba, where he was invited in 1985 to headline the Fifth International Jazz Festival of Havana. For Mr. Gillespie, who is now 71 years old, the journey was a kind of spiritual homecoming. In the late 1940's, he had been one of the first American jazz musicians to incorporate Afro-Cuban polyrhythms into a big-band setting.

''A Night in Havana: Dizzy Gillespie in Cuba'' documents the great jazz trumpeter's triumphal visit to Cuba, where he was invited in 1985 to headline the Fifth International Jazz Festival of Havana. For Mr. Gillespie, who is now 71 years old, the journey was a kind of spiritual homecoming. In the late 1940's, he had been one of the first American jazz musicians to incorporate Afro-Cuban polyrhythms into a big-band setting. But until quite recently, political conditions prevented him from traveling to the country whose music had inspired him four decades earlier.

The movie, which opens today at the Bleecker Street Cinema, offers a carefully fleshed-out portrait of a musician whose robust musical ebullience is matched by an earthy sense of humor. One sequence finds him horsing around with an admiring Fidel Castro. And during an interview with the Cuban press, he tells a possibly apocryphal story of an incident in an Illinois nightclub that caused him to play with a bent trumpet. An amusing explanation of the logistics of puffing out his cheeks when playing leads to funny impromptu speculation on the relation between body parts, breathing and attitude.

But beneath the humor, there are bitter memories. Like every other black musician of his generation, Mr. Gillespie encountered racial discrimination while growing up. Remembering his boyhood in rural South Carolina, he recalls not being permitted to use the whites-only public-drinking fountain. And his thoughts on how the differences in the ways Africans were treated in America and in Cuba affected the evolution of music in the two countries are saddening but instructive. Because the drum wasn't banned in Cuba as in America during slavery times, blacks there were able to maintain much stronger connections with their African tribal cultures than those in America.

There is an abundance of happy music in the movie, which shows Mr. Gillespie performing with the virtuosic trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and the pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, among other Cuban musicians. Their reverence for Mr. Gillespie and his thrill at playing with them infuse the movie with a warm party atmosphere.
LATIN JAZZ -A NIGHT IN HAVANA: DIZZY GILLESPIE IN CUBA, directed by John Holland; written by Allen Honigberg; director of photography, Bill Megalos; edited by Vincent Stenerson; produced by Nim Polanetska; a Cinephile USA release. At Bleecker Street Cinema, at La Guardia Place. Running time: 84 minutes. This film has no rating.
WITH: Dizzy Gillespie